Category: weekend recap

Weekend Recap: Killing Nazis on the Moon

(Before I forget, I wrote up a thing over at Gamemoir taking a guess at what Rockstar’s new title is going to be.  It went up yesterday, when most of the USA was away from the internet, so if you’d like to check it out, here it is.)

Here’s something I never expected to say:  I’m far more interested in finishing Wolfenstein than I am in firing up Watch Dogs, which just arrived and which is sitting in my messenger bag at this very moment.  As much of a sucker as I am for open world games, and as much as I succumbed to the insane amount of hype that Watch Dogs had gunning for it, I am thoroughly enjoying Wolfenstein and very well might go back to play it again once I finish it – or, at least, go back chapter by chapter to find all the hidden stuff I missed.

Whenever I talk about “shooter fatigue”, I’m talking about a combination of things:  (1) a lot of the big budget shooters (and there are quite a few of them) basically feel and look the same; (2) those shooters have very flimsy narratives and it’s often a struggle to understand why you’re going where you’re going or why you have to kill so many people beyond those people being “the enemy”; and (3) I’ve grown weary of having the murdering of virtual people as the primary game mechanic.

Wolfy solves a lot of these problems for me, actually, and one of them comes as a complete surprise.  In 2008 I’d complained of how tired I was about shooting Nazis, actually:

Nazis have been the de facto bad guys in popular culture for the last 50 years. They are a perfect enemy; nobody gets offended when you have to kill them. Castle Wolfenstein illustrated this in interactive 3D, and the videogame boom as we know it was born.

I think, however, that we’ve reached a point in our society where the evilness of Nazis has lost a bit of its power. The videogaming generation did not grow up in WW2, and neither did its parents. When you kill Nazis in videogames, you’re not avenging the horrors of the Holocaust anymore, or freeing Europe from the tyrannical grips of a monster; you are killing bad guys in order to make it to the next checkpoint, and Nazis have always been an easy target for game designers because (a) you don’t have to worry about cultural sensitivity issues, and (b) who doesn’t enjoy killing Nazis? It’s just that most WW2 games these days don’t really focus on the why; they focus on the experience of the soldier in the middle of the battle, rather than the reason why the soldier is over there in the first place, and as a result, the enemy Nazi soldier is no longer as capital-E Evil because they all look the same and there’s so damn many of them.

As it happens, that same column was about how zombies were the new Nazis, and how I thought that was kind of great, because we needed a new type of baddie to kill.  Now, of course, zombies are everywhere, and it’s gotten to the point where I actively avoid playing games with zombies – even The Walking Dead Season 2 – because I’m so, so tired of them.

So you can imagine the irony in which I’m now singing the praises of a game that eschews zombies altogether and goes back to killin’ Nazis, and how much goddamned fun it is to be killing all of them.  I feel, at times, like I’m a part of the Inglorious Basterds, and it can feel downright cathartic to mow down wave after wave of them.

And I also can’t say it enough, how impressed I am at how good the game feels.  The shooting is excellent; your arsenal is potent and varied, and I’m always pleased at how I can improvise and change tactics with a different weapon if my preferred gun is low on ammo.  (Also:  dual-wielding automatic shotguns is insane.)  The game is also fantastically paced, especially for my personal tastes; there is plenty of action, to be sure, but there are also welcome lulls (and also dedicated sections in the resistance safehouse) where I can root around and look for hidden items and secrets (of which there are so many, which is delightful).  I’m probably 8 or 9 hours in at this point and there have only been maybe 3 or 4 times where I’ve come across a frustratingly high spike in difficulty (one section in particular drove me bananas, though I did eventually manage to outlast it), and those spikes were often solved simply by remembering that I don’t always have to charge in head-first.

I remain surprised at how much I’m enjoying myself, and part of that may simply be that I never expected a Wolfenstein game to be this good.  The Wolfenstein brand has always been more important than the games themselves, I think; the original game is what started this whole 3D first-person shooter thing in the first place, and while we may have fond memories of playing it way back when, I don’t know anyone who prefers that game to Doom.  I played bits of the last few Wolfenstein sequels on consoles, and they always felt somewhat out of date; or, rather, that each subsequent sequel felt like a desperate attempt to keep the IP relevant.  This game, on the other hand, feels remarkably fresh and alive, and yet it also knows how silly it is.  After wiping out most of a U-Boat’s crew, the captain exasperatedly exclaims – “What’s wrong with you?  He’s just one man!”  B.J. Blazkowicz himself, after infiltrating the Nazi lunar base and radioing back to his resistance HQ, says, “Well, I’m on the fucking moon.”

Re: that silliness – I understand what the critics are talking about w/r/t the game’s wildly divergent tone.  There are opportunities for character development that never quite get maximized, and one can get the impression that the corporate overlords at Bethesda/ZeniMax took the developers aside and said “Hey, enough with the talky-talky, we need more shooty-shooty.”  Still, what’s there can be rich and deep and dark, and I guess I’m just grateful that it’s there at all.  B.J.’s comrades have very different motivations for joining a resistance that they all acknowledge has nearly no chance of succeeding, and even if they’re not given all that much to do, they feel real enough to make you feel like part of something important.

It’s a hell of thing, really, to make a Wolfenstein game in 2014 feel important.  To that end, I tip my cap to Machine Games, who’ve made something quite special indeed.

Weekend Recap: Fun in the Sun

As with most weekends of late, there wasn’t a lot of gaming done.  Two reasons for this:  (1) I’m not particularly engaged with any specific game right now, and (2) it was an absolutely gorgeous weekend in NYC, and we were out and about for a great deal of it.

I’m still sorta playing Diablo III, though only in quick bursts – which is fine, actually, considering what the new endgame is like.  It’s easy enough to go in to an Act, collect some bounties, enter a rift, and scoop up some nice loot and then hop out after 30 minutes or so.

Did I mention that I formally gave up on Mario Golf: World Tour?  I won the first two tournaments but found the whole thing so empty and shallow that I just wanted it out of my house.  There’s a country club filled with stuff you can’t actually do – including a fully built-out gym, and you’d think you’d be able to hang out in it and do some mini-game exercises to help train your character and improve your stats, but there’s literally nothing to do in there but talk to characters who offer dumb platitudes about hard work – but you still have to walk through it in order to get to the courses.  It makes no sense whatsoever.  And the golf itself is as uninspiring and rote as the rest of the game, which is depressing.

I am now starting to sink my teeth into my Vita, though.  I played enough of my rented copy of God of War Collection to gather that it’s a rather uninspired and bare-boned port of the first two PS2 games, which were much better presented in an HD collection on the PS3.

But I’m also now a few save points into Final Fantasy X, which is, among other things, one of the main reasons why I finally bought the Vita when I did.  Having never played the original game, I can’t really vouch for the Vita experience other than to say that it looks utterly fantastic, even on the Slim’s “inferior” screen (which also, sadly, highlights just how not fantastic the God of War Collection looks).  I am very much looking forward to spending more time with it in the coming weeks, although how much time remains to be seen – Transistor comes out this week, as does Wolfenstein, and then Watch Dogs comes out next week.

And as long as I’m talking about the Vita, I might as well pimp my latest Gamemoir column, “Five Ideas to Help Save the Vita“, which is an admittedly hacky title but comes from a sincere place.  I genuinely dislike those types of SEO-friendly headlines – which is probably why this blog is still pretty small – but in this case, it is what it is.

Weekend Recap: Easy Mode

My new piece for Gamemoir just went up:  “There Is No Shame In Easy Mode.”  I feel pretty good about it, though it did go up a few hours before I thought it would, and I would’ve liked one last chance to proof it and make sure it was in tip-top shape.  In any event, it’s too late to take it back now!

Almost no gaming happened this weekend; we were at my mom’s new house for the Mother’s Day weekend, and between the baby and two sets of grandparents and everything else, I barely had the time to finish revising the Gamemoir piece, let alone play anything.

That said, I did finally get a chance to look at Borderlands 2 for my Vita, which took a literal three (3) days to download.  And after all that, it pains me to say that as much as I love Borderlands 2, I’m not sure this port was worth it.  I mean, hey, it’s great, portable Borderlands!  And it’s free, and came with all of the DLC!  But it also kinda looks a little shitty, and the Vita’s controls are just never going to compete with using a real controller.  And yet, because it took 3 days to download, there’s a part of me that would feel stupid to delete it from my memory stick.

I’m also nearly fully soured on Mario Golf World Tour.  I’ve had no desire to play it, or even think about it, and that’s sad; I like golf in videogame form, especially in a portable one.  It’s a rental, and my queue doesn’t get busy for a few more weeks, so I may hold on to it and give it one more real go, but it’s hard to stay excited for it.

No idea what’s happening this week.  I’ve yet to play my rental copy of MLB 14 The Show for PS4; that might be worth checking out, especially since my wife and I just cut the cable cord and no longer have easy access to live sports.  But I’ve always been kinda terrible at the hitting phase of the MLB games, which is (as you might imagine) a rather large part of the gameplay experience.  So I’m not necessarily holding my breath.

In the meantime, check out that Easy Mode column.  I’ve got to start figuring out next week’s pitch, too…

Weekend Recap: Back Into Hell

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT: my new piece for Gamemoir just went up!  
“What the E.T. Game Taught Me About Life, Criticism, and Self-Doubt”

The short version:  I am utterly surprised to find myself thoroughly re-addicted to Diablo III, after spending nearly 2 years away from it in a self-imposed exile.

The question inspired by the long version:  How do you make the simple, repetitive, monotonous and tedious act of left- and right-clicking a million times compelling?  And when one has spent over 80 hours doing this, thoroughly burning themselves out in the process to the point where the mere idea of playing other, similar games causes mild panic attacks (I again apologize to Torchlight II), how do you get them to come back?

This was a busy and productive weekend as far as non-gaming, family business was concerned – though this is not the proper venue to discuss that (at least not quite yet).   But it’s worth bringing up if only to explain what I found myself doing on Saturday morning.

I was a little nervous about our day-trip activities on Saturday; and so, in need of some sort of distraction, I felt compelled to fix my Blizzard account, which had been broken for quite some time.  [For purposes of clarity, I’m going to lay this out in bullet points, mostly because it’s Monday and when I wrote this as a long paragraph, even I lost the thread.]

  • At the height of my Diablo III addiction, I’d attached an Authenticator to my account in the interest of added security.  As you do.
  • But then, at a certain point long after I’d stopped playing regularly, the iPhone that the Authenticator app was attached to broke and needed to be replaced.
  • When I got my iPhone replaced, and when I got around to re-downloading the Authenticator app, the sync was off and I couldn’t log in.
  • As it happens, this wasn’t necessarily the end of the world – my PC hard drive had crashed around the same time, and when I replaced it, I never bothered to reinstall Diablo III, since I figured I was still done with it.
  • When the Reaper of Souls expansion was announced, I found myself mildly curious, but, of course, my account was still screwed up and when I looked into how to fix it, it seemed like too much work to bother.  (Blizzard is really serious about making sure you want to remove your Authenticator, requiring Government-issued IDs and such.)
  • But now there’s Hearthstone, which I’m kinda wanting to start to engage with, and I felt like I really ought to get off my ass and fix the account, since maybe I have friends who are playing?
  • And so I bit the bullet and dealt with Blizzard security and fixed my account.
  • And then I figured, well, now that I can log in again, why not download Diablo III again while we’re out on our adventure so that I can see what’s up when we came back?

Upon our return, and after the kid went to bed, I saw that Diablo III had, in fact, finished downloading.  And so I fired it up.  And then I found myself accidentally on purpose buying the aforementioned Reaper of Souls expansion, and then I looked up and saw that 4 hours had flown by.

Now, as far as I can tell, this post from August 2012 marks the last time I spent any significant time with Diablo III, and that was really just to check out the 1.0.4 patch, in hopes that the tweaks were enough to keep me invested.  [tl,dr:  It was intriguing, but not enough.]

It’s kinda frightening how quickly it all came back.  My stats bore out that I’d already sunk over 80 hours into it when it first came out – I’d hit the level cap with my female Monk*, and I’d gotten 2 other classes somewhat up to speed, and I’d ultimately burned myself out because the endgame was repetitive and tedious and the loot was hardly worth the time or effort – most of what I’d been equipping was stuff from the Auction House anyway.  Indeed, Blizzard had been aware of this very issue, and if I recall correctly that’s what the 1.0.4 patch was intended to address.  It wasn’t enough for me; I’d seen everything the campaign had to offer 10 times over, and the higher loot drop rate just wasn’t enough of a pull anymore.

But nearly 2 years later, the game feels remarkably fresh and revitalized, and – as far as the new campaign is concerned – I’m totally sucked back in.  I have barely scratched the surface of what’s new and improved, as I’ve only touched the new act of the campaign, but I can at least verify firsthand that kick-ass, equippable loot is dropping for me about every 5-10 minutes or so, even on Normal difficulty.  The mind reels at what will start dropping once I finish this run and start at a higher difficulty level.

In fact, here’s my current build – and I’m nearly positive that everything I’ve equipped is all brand-new stuff I’ve picked up since Saturday night, which is insane.  I mean, it used to take me hours just to find one usable weapon that was markedly improved from what I’d equipped; but now, in just a few hours’ worth of play, nearly every equippable slot has seen at least one incredible new drop.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/JervoNYC-1540/hero/47756480

So, yeah, I’m totally enjoying the shit out of it,again, which I suppose is the greatest surprise of all.  I suppose I’d sort-of been checking out the PS4 version whenever it came out, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to play through the original campaign again – nor was I sure that I’d have access to my current character roster, and the thought of losing 80+ hours of progress just to play the game on my TV wasn’t particularly appealing.  In any event, this is a moot point now – I prefer playing this game with a mouse and keyboard, in the relative quiet of my office, and my PC runs the game quite well.

I’m not sure I can answer the question I posed above – the one about how Blizzard has managed to make me fall in love all over again with something I’d been thoroughly exhausted by – but goddamn, they totally succeeded.  Even if it’s simply a matter of performance – and I should definitely point out that the game is running much smoother now than it ever did before (which I’m sure is a combination of both Blizzard fixing things on their end, and my securing of a faster internet connection since the last time I’d played), it’d be enough to have a transformative experience.   I’d also wager that having a new campaign to play is helping to keep things fresh.

But I suppose the kick-ass loot has something to do with it too.

* I’m not sure why I took the time to mention that she’s female, except that later this month I’ll be publishing something on Videodame.com about my experiences playing as female characters – whether by the game’s choice or my own – and when I was putting together my research and going through all the times I’ve played as a woman, I guess I’d totally forgotten than I’d rolled a female monk in Diablo III, probably because I’d blocked out Diablo III from my brain.

 

Weekend Recap: Trials and Tribulations

This was an absolutely perfect weekend, weather-wise; it’s true that I’d settle for anything after the winter we’ve had, but this was a beauty, and we were able to enjoy it to its fullest.

Of course, now it’s Monday and I’m utterly exhausted.  But I’ll still consider the weekend a win.

There’s not a lot of gaming happening these days, though; the Vita’s (finally) in the shop, I’d already gotten 100% completion in Infamous Second Son, and my attempts at playing side missions in Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes immediately reminded me why I kinda hate that series.  I’m kinda plugging away at Rayman Legends on the PS4, and it’s fun and charming and also frustratingly difficult – though at least it’s not as intolerable as, say, Dark Souls II.

The one thing I’m playing with any sort of intensity is Trials Frontier for iOS, which I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop since its release last week.  I’m a huge Trials fan anyway, and I’ve already pre-ordered Trials Fusion for the PS4 (which I think comes out tomorrow?), and I’m pleased to report that Trials works about as well as you can hope for on an iPhone.  New to the Trials experience is an actual narrative, which (surprisingly) isn’t terrible.  It looks gorgeous and feels pretty good – I mean, I do wish I was playing it with a controller, and I must admit that my thumbs are kinda mushed from pressing them so tightly against the iPhone screen, but it definitely works, and you can more or less do the things you need to do without too much difficulty.  That being said, I think I’ve started to reach that inevitable point in any Trials game where the things I need to do are just beyond my abilities, so… there’s that.

Other than that, it’s quiet.  I’m getting my iPad loaded up for my upcoming vacation, which is at the end of this week; I’ve got FTL ready to go, and Shadowrun, and a very cute and charming puzzler called CLARC, which I’ve played a few levels of on the iPhone already but which I’d like to see on the bigger screen.

Finally, my first post over at Gamemoir should be going up later today, which is pretty exciting.  More about that in a bit.

Weekend Recap: tying up loose ends

I am currently playing The Waiting Game, a dispiriting “race against the clock”-type deal wherein I hope to receive my fixed-up Vita before April 17, my last day in the office before I leave for vacation.  As I have not yet received the box they sent me to mail the Vita back, it’s not looking good.  (I have not yet received my snazzy Vita travelling case, either, but since there’s no working Vita to put it in, I’m not sweating it.)

I finished 3 games over the weekend that merit discussion, though.  Let’s start at the top and work our way down.

1.  Monument Valley is an iOS puzzler – imagine Fez with level designs by M.C. Escher – currently available for $3.99.  It is an absolutely gorgeous game, filled with very clever puzzle design and accented with lovely sound effects.  It is also only 10 levels long and I beat it in under an hour.  Normally I’m not the type of person who gets up in arms when it comes to high prices for short play experiences – I was very happy to pay $20 for Gone Home – and I’m not necessarily up in arms here, but I would certainly understand your frustration if you laid out 4 bucks for a game that you could finish during your evening commute, especially since there’s not a tremendous amount of replay value once you’ve figured out the solutions.  That being said, the game’s creator, when asked in a Touch Arcade Twitch stream if new levels were coming, said: “Looks like we will. People seem to want more levels.”  I know I do.

2.  I did end up finishing Bioshock Infinite: Burial At Sea Ep. 2, though the last few combat sections were brutally difficult and annoying and I nearly rage-quit a few times.  Even though I’ve played all the games (well, all the Irrational ones at least – I can’t recall if I finished Bioshock 2, and I only played the first 5 minutes of Minerva’s Den), I’m not necessarily sure that I’m as knowledgeable about the lore and the supporting cast of characters as I suppose I should’ve been, in order to better appreciate the finer intricacies of Episode 2’s plot points.  The final reveal is interesting, to be sure, though I’m not sure it enhanced anything for me.  I’m glad I played it, I guess, but I just wish I didn’t hate the gameplay as much as I do.

3.  Also finished Infamous: Second Son.  I’m kinda still playing it, too – once I finished the story (and received the fourth of four powers), I then started going back and doing all the side stuff that I couldn’t be bothered with during the regular story.  (Also:  I didn’t realize the campaign was going to be as short as it was, so I ended up finishing the game long before I thought I would.)  It’s certainly the prettiest PS4 game I’ve seen, and it sets a very high graphical standard for open-world adventure games to follow; but it’s also an Infamous game, and I always seem to forget that Infamous games start out kinda fun and then become somewhat forgettable.  The good/bad karma thing is, as always, kinda dumb, and unfortunately the story just isn’t interesting enough to warrant a second playthrough to see how things would change.  This very well might be one of the easiest open-world games to get to 100% completion – there’s not a whole hell of a lot to do, side-mission wise, and all the “hidden” stuff is actually placed on your map once you clear out an enemy base.  I will probably continue tooling around and trying to get to 100%, if only because it really is that gorgeous to look at.

This coming week:  not really sure what it’s looking like, gaming-wise.  I’m kinda still playing through Strider and Rayman Legends on the PS4, and I may give some of the side-missions in MGS: Ground Zeroes a shot.  And depending on what happens with my Vita, I may or may not end up buying FTL for my iPad.

 

weekend recap: notes and errata

This weekend we celebrated my son’s 1st birthday, and as such there was not a tremendous amount of time for gaming – so I’m still in a holding pattern as far as Infamous Second Son and MGS Ground Zeroes are concerned. Still, there’s a couple things that I wanted to talk about, so here we go:

1.  In my haste to get that Tokyo Police Club post out the door, I completely forgot to include what is arguably the most important point I was trying to make:

In this current social and economic climate, where trying to make a living as a professional musician is arguably as difficult as it’s ever been because nobody buys records anymore and revenue from streaming services like Spotify is laughable at best, and for a band that’s trying as hard as it possibly can to prove to both its old fans and its potential new ones that it didn’t hit its creative peak 8 years ago, it takes an astounding set of brass balls to have the first (and best) song on your new album be nearly 9 minutes long.  And because the song is so good precisely because of how well-constructed it is, and because editing it for the purposes of making it a single kinda defeats the song’s whole purpose, it seems improbable that it’ll see any significant radio/airplay.  (It is fortunate – and probably much appreciated by the record label – that the 2nd song (“Hot Tonight“) is also quite catchy and hummable and ear-wormy.)  But still:  I remain impressed that they did what they did.  Bands don’t often get a chance to make more than 3 albums these days before either getting dropped from the label or just imploding naturally.  If this album tanks, it may very well be the end of TPC – I suspect there’ll be a solo album or two from the singer, but you can only hang on to your dream for so long before the bills start to pile up.

2.  I did manage to squeeze in a little bit of Bioshock Infinite: Burial At Sea Pt. 2.  I’m not quite sure how far I am into it, and so I’m reluctant to discuss it in great detail.  But there are certainly things about it that merit discussion.

My relationship with the Bioshock franchise is in a difficult place, to be honest.  I’m still in love with the technical side of the game – the graphics and audio remain superlative, and it’s very difficult to play the game without wanting to take screenshots at every single moment.  It is more that my appreciation for the games’ narrative ambitions – even if they’re not entirely coherent – are directly at odds with their gameplay, which I’ve always found problematic.  As it happens, I fell in love with BAS2 pretty much immediately, and remained enthralled with it… right up until I picked up my first weapon, and then my heart sank a bit.

That this episode switches the emphasis from shooting to stealth is a very smart move, and in retrospect it feels incredibly obvious, and I’m certainly not the first to make the observation that it’s entirely possible that the entire franchise might’ve benefited greatly from being a stealth-focused shooter right from the get-go.  It’s just that…. well… considering how much intelligence went into crafting every other element of these games, making the game combat-focused above all else feels like an easy reach towards the lowest common denominator of audience.  I’ve felt this way ever since the first game, and even though the stealth approach feels a lot more natural, I still kinda hate it.

Still – I won’t fully speak my peace until I’m finished with the episode.

3.  Last week was a bit of an emotional downer, as far as things go, and so in my melancholic state I went and did a silly thing and ordered a PS Vita.  I also ordered a protective case and a 32gb memory card.  The problem is that while the Vita and case arrived on Thursday (as promised), the card is still nowhere to be found – it should’ve arrived on Friday, and I’m hoping that it didn’t get lost entirely.  And because the memory card is not here, the Vita itself is completely useless – I can’t even turn it on and get it set up without it.  (And because the Vita only works with these specifically branded memory cards, I can’t just run out to Staples and buy a non-Sony one.)  I know this is old news, but it’s infuriating that the Vita is set in such a stupid manner.

UPDATE:  the card literally just arrived as I typed that last sentence.  Woo-hoo!

UPDATE 2:  the Vita won’t work on my office wi-fi, so I can’t actually do anything just yet.  Boo-hoo!

The first few hours: Infamous Second Son

CURRENT STATUS:  I’m around 3-4 hours into Infamous: Second Son; I’ve acquired smoke and neon powers; I think my karma is whatever Level 3 Good is called (“Champion”, perhaps).

ON THE ONE HAND, Infamous Second Son is a graphics whore’s delight.  It is, without question, one of the most beautiful-looking games I’ve ever seen.  It is so pretty, in fact, that I now feel fully justified in upgrading to a PS4.  I don’t know how to articulate the game’s beauty in a technical sense, so I’m linking to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry analysis of the game’s first hour in case you need to know how and why.  What I can tell you is that even in spite of some minor frame rate jitters, the game is jaw-dropping to behold.  Seeing neon light reflected in puddles – or even just the way the ambient light fades as you absorb the neon from a nearby sign – is stunning.  The animation is also quite spectacular – there’s so many subtle details in the way the main character Delsin moves, or how his hands articulate as he runs (or even as he stands still).

And while I still wonder why Sony feels it necessary to make sure that every game uses the Dualshock 4’s touchpad whenever possible, at least it’s used wisely here – and by “wisely”, I mean “very quickly and very infrequently.”  The game also uses the controller in a novel way whenever Delsin starts tagging, Banksy-style; it’s a little gimmicky, sure, but it’s not offensively gimmicky.

And I’d also be remiss in mentioning the supercharged move you get when you max out your karma combo meter specifically with the neon power – it feels like a summons right out of Final Fantasy, except it’s you doing it, and it’s spectacular.

ON THE OTHER HAND, though: the game is really, really difficult and frustrating.  I expected this sort of thing in Dark Souls 2, and even though it’s part of the experience it annoyed me so much I nearly broke the game disc in half.  But I didn’t expect it here, and that’s what’s so dumbfounding – especially since, unlike in Dark Souls 2, a lot of my deaths feel horrifically unfair.  Regardless of how many superpowers Delsin might absorb, he can only take a miniscule amount of damage – and the enemy is really good at juggling you in place so that you can’t escape.  When I die, I die a lot, and it makes me feel less inclined to explore and do certain side activities, at least until I’ve powered up my abilities a bit further – and I haven’t seen anything in the way of upgrading my defensive abilities, like taking more damage or the like.  I find myself stopping a play session not because of time, or because I ended in a chapter break, but because I’m frustrated and can’t figure out how the hell I’m supposed to defeat this wave of enemies without getting chopped into bits.

And while the virtual Seattle on display is absolutely gorgeous, I don’t really have a good feel of the city since a lot of my travelling is along rooftops and such.  It’s the same sort of disconnect that I had with Saints Row 4 – the city feels abstract because I’m not really in it the way that I am in, say, GTA V‘s Los Santos.  I suppose at some point I should write up a thing about cities in open-world games and why some of them work better than others, but in the case of I:SS it’s really just that I’m constantly moving around and so I don’t really have a sense of where I am at any given point.  A waypoint appears on my map, and so I head in that direction.  There’s no home base, no point to return to, and so the experience of being in the city is somewhat ethereal and transient.  I’ve already been to the Space Needle, the harbor and a bunch of other places but I couldn’t tell you how I got there, or how I’d get back.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Delsin as a character.  After about 10 minutes it becomes clear that the developers couldn’t hire Nolan North, so they hired a sound-alike; the problem is that Delsin is all over the place as a character.  He’s charming, he’s a wise-ass, he’s well-meaning but very high-strung and confrontational, he’s bad-but-also-good.  He changes from scene to scene but not in any noticeable direction, so there’s no sense of journey or arc; almost as if his interactions with other characters were written by completely different people and then shuffled out of chronological order.  I’m still early in the story, so there’s certainly plenty of room for him to eventually land, but right now it’s hard to relate to him.  (I’m not even sure I know how old he is; his older brother, a cop, looks 20 years older than him and in the pre-release trailers I thought he was Delsin’s father.)

The graphics go a long way towards keeping me engaged, and I’m certainly going to stick with it for the foreseeable future.  I just wish I was having a bit more fun.

weekend recap: slings and arrows and farts

It’s not an iron-clad rule, but I generally prefer to avoid prefacing my entries here with personal asides.  It’s just that as far as Monday mornings go, this one has been particularly stressful and exhausting and miserable, and as I write this it’s not even lunchtime.  Can’t really say much more than that, unfortunately; I’m writing this mostly as a way of finding some zen within the chaos.

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Today’s must-read:  Russ Pitts on engaging with trolls.   This is, coincidentally enough, related to the link I posted a week or two ago which mocked that same troll.

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I finished South Park: The Stick of Truth late Friday night.  It’s a hell of a game, regardless of the level of your South Park fandom.  As I said the other day, I’d hardly call myself a huge fan – it’s been years since I watched the show on a regular basis – but I’m a fan in my heart, and I consider the movie one of the funniest movies ever made.  I say this so that you understand that even if I didn’t catch every single reference, I didn’t have to in order to enjoy the experience.  This is about as perfect a South Park game as one could reasonably hope for; the game is wickedly funny, and yet also a tremendous amount of fun to play and engage with.  

I finished the game in a little over 12 hours; I did nearly every side quest I could find, I hit the level cap quite easily, and I never stopped enjoying myself.  

That being said, it’s the sort of game that I can’t really see myself playing ever again.  Unlike, say, Skyrim – which SPSoT takes certain inspirations from – this game is fairly linear, and while there’s a lot to explore there aren’t necessarily any rabbit holes to fall into that you can’t quickly back out of.  I suppose playing as a different class might yield some slightly different jokes, but the overall experience would still be more or less identical.  It’s rare that I’d call a great game a “rental”, but there it is.

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Every once in a while I cross-post something here over at Kotaku’s TAY forum.  On a whim, I decided to cross-post the thing I wrote about political agendas and bad stomachs over there, and it got a pretty nice response and generated some healthy dialogue in the comments.

One of the comment threads – from someone who disagreed with my premise and said, in no uncertain terms, that they did NOT want to play any game with a political agenda, even if it was something they agreed with – caused me to eventually copy/paste from this excellent Believer interview with Harold Ramis, which I’d previously linked to on my tumblr.  I’m pasting the whole thing below, because it’s worth repeating.  (bolded text added for emphasis)

From The Believer:  http://www.believermag.com/issues/200603/?read=interview_ramis

BLVR: Rumor has it that you turned down the chance to direct Disney’s remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner because you felt they weren’t interested in really exploring racism.

HR: The way they wanted to do it didn’t have a lot to do with the colossal amount of pain and violence that swirls around racial injustice. It would’ve been like an episode of The Jeffersons.What’s the point? But who knows, maybe that’s as much as most people want. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.”

BLVR: Does that offend you as a filmmaker?

HR: It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head? Or people’ll say that they don’t want to see any negative emotions. They don’t want to see unpleasantness. I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, “If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I’ll stay home.”

BLVR: Wow. I guess audiences just want more movies about stoned teenagers trying to find their cars.

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I came this close to sending Dark Souls II back in the mail this morning.  I played for about 30 minutes on Saturday night; I died 3 times, and each of those deaths felt cheap.  I’m not necessarily a big fan of ultra-difficult games, but I’m willing to engage with them if there’s enough people who convince me to at least try them out, and the thing that nearly everybody says is that while these games are hard, they’re almost never unfair.  Well, my three deaths were absolutely unfair, and they pissed me off, and instead of feeling challenged I felt taken advantage of.  

BUT.  

Because my rental copy of Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes won’t arrive until Thursday at the earliest (and which I’m pretty “meh” about anyway), and because my digitally pre-ordered copy of Infamous Second Sons won’t be unlocked until Friday, I’m feeling like maybe I should try giving Dark Souls II one more shot, from scratch, and see if maybe I can dig a little deeper and try to get past what was pissing me off so much.  My hopes aren’t high, mind you; it’s just that I’ve got nothing else going on, game-wise, and so I might as well see if I can approach it from a slightly different angle.

 

weekend recap: bones

1.  The newly-announced Titanfall / Xbox One bundle sounds intriguing, it really does.  Except… I still kinda don’t give a shit about Titanfall.  Which is, of course, not Titanfall’s fault; my friends who were in the beta say it’s pretty awesome, and I’d expect nothing less.  It’s just that:  (a) I’m still not all that into multiplayer shooters, and (b) with each new major multi-platform release, comparisons between the PS4 and the XBO make it that much clearer that the PS4 is the better-performing console.  I’d get the XBO if there were a true killer app for it that specifically appeals to my tastes – and, indeed, that day may yet come – but for now, I’d rather keep that $500 in my savings account if I can.

2.  I was curious to try the Final Fantasy 14 beta over the weekend, but the installer kept crashing.  After spending 20 minutes signing up and creating passwords and squinting like mad to read the fine print (is there really no way to expand the internet within an app?), everything seemed like it was OK, but then the installer would conk out once it hit 20%.  It’s just as well, I suppose – I can’t really afford to get sunk into an MMO right now anyway.

3.  I continue to make progress in Bravely Default; my party is level 35 or so, my town is pretty much fully rebuilt, and the difficulty level is now starting to weave all over the place; dungeon mobs are still mostly one-turn kills, but bosses and “asterisk fights” are ludicrously hard.  It is not quite getting tedious, but I think that’s because I’m still only playing in short bursts.

4.  Reviews for the new Thief are all over the place; mostly negative, but some reviewers are willing to cut it some more slack than others.  Here’s the part where I tell you that I’m aware of, but never played, the original, highly regarded trilogy, and so my interest in this game is purely out of wanting something to play on the PS4.  I did play one Thief game a while ago – was it the the one on the original Xbox? – and it suffered from a lot of the same problems that Deus Ex II did, which makes sense since I think they were using the same engine.  And I wasn’t particularly good at it, though I think that’s because my experience with stealth games was largely influenced by Splinter Cell, and you really can’t play Thief like you’re Sam Fisher.  So I’m hoping that I can be a bit more patient with this one, if only so that I can not send it back after 10 minutes.

5.  Speaking of having (or not having) patience, here’s a funny story.  I rented Far Cry 2 when it first came out in 2008; played for 5 minutes, died in the very first shootout, and said “fuck it”; sent it back to Gamefly.  In the intervening years, Far Cry 2 has taken on this mythical “greatest game ever” status among certain critics and people I greatly admire, and there was always a little part of me that wondered if I gave up on it too quickly.  Fast forward to this past weekend, where Ubisoft had a massive Steam sale.  I looked up at one point and saw that Far Cry 2 was being sold for something like $2.49.  Picked it up immediately.  Loaded it up.  Died in the exact same first shootout, screen faded to black.

BUT THEN THE SCREEN FADED BACK UP AGAIN.  And a man was talking to me and the game was teaching me how to heal myself.

All this time, I’d thought I just sucked at Far Cry 2.  I never knew that you’re supposed to get knocked out in that first shootout.  I am an idiot.

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Today’s subject title is from the excellent self-titled album by The Forms.